JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

This post offers supplementary material for an article I recently wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. The Globe , October 11, 1907. The fear of the "yellow peril" in action - one of the more jaw-dropping (from a modern perspective) editorials regarding the place of Chinese in Canadian society during the early 20th century.

This installment of my "Ghost City" column for The Grid was originally published on February 12, 2013. Portrait of William Peyton Hubbard, 1913, by W.A. Sherwood. When William Peyton Hubbard was born in 1842 it’s doubtful his father, a freed slave who had arrived in Toronto two years earlier, imagined that the infant would become one of the city’s most powerful politicians. The road to that accomplishment took time: Before Hubbard entered politics in 1893, he baked cakes and drove a horse cab, occupations that were the norm for the city’s small black population.